Abstract
Welcome to our second issue of the year! As we are all experiencing, living through the COVID-19 crisis has been an emotionally draining time for us all. Now the pandemic continues to present challenges both in and outside of our classrooms due to new variants emerging and swiftly changing lockdowns and border restrictions. As we start our next terms, we recognize that many of our students are similarly exhausted, and they have struggled with numerous challenges throughout the last two years. There are places of hope where countries are sustaining some level of face-to-face instruction, other locations where universities are returning to the classroom, and in other locations, this is not possible yet. Similarly, in our professional lives, many domestic and international conferences will continue in virtual and hybrid mode in the first part of 2022. We remain cautiously optimistic that by mid-year at the MOBTS 2022, we will be seeing our friends and colleagues face-to-face again and enjoying rich conversations and debates about important issues in our field. One of these debates includes how we might keep adapting our scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research in these extraordinarily complex times.
For decades Special Issues have been one of the key mechanisms for advancing SoTL. This editorial addresses some questions we have received from our readers in the past about Special Issues and we hope to unpack various unknown or opaque editorial processes for authors. Common questions we have received include, “What is a Special Issue (SI)?”, “Why do you publish them?” and, frequently, “What makes them so special?” This past summer we recently announced an open call for Special Issue proposals at JME, which allows teams of authors to submit proposals on a rolling basis throughout the year. This generated several queries from prospective authors in addition to some exciting proposals; as such, we wanted to explore the topic in a little more depth. As we will discuss, in the fields of organization studies and management and across the sciences and social sciences, Special Issues are a very common practice. In our experience, however, they represent something of a mystery. How did Special Issues come to be popular? What benefits (and potential concerns) are associated with Special Issues? In this editorial we’ll explore the nature of Special Issues, consider the debates, briefly discuss our Special Issues in JME for the last six years, emphasize what we look for in proposals, and highlight our ongoing calls.
What are Special Issues?
First, what are Special Issues? Special Issues, which are also known as themed issues (Sage, 2021), or special research forums (Rynes, 2003), are typically an entire issue or a significant part of an issue focused on a specific topic area and include leading-edge research in a given domain (Childe, 2018). Special Issues are designed to fit within a journal’s aims and scope and appeal to the general readership (Elsevier, 2021). As such, they are considered a “great way to focus attention on a hot topic” (Sage, 2021) and spotlight novel methods, theories, and practices for readers. These are curated in two main ways: from a symposium dedicated to the targeted topic (e.g., at a conference) or by open invitation through a call for papers issued by a journal. We have a rich history of Special Issues at JME and have found that they can help to encourage research into under-studied topics and focus attention on important areas in the field.
Who Benefits From Special Issues?
Many groups can benefit from the publication of a Special Issue, and we highlight these briefly as follows. Firstly, authors can generally benefit from publishing in Special Issues with increased citation of their work, although we acknowledge that the research findings are somewhat mixed. According to Elsevier’s analysis, “Special content articles attract 20% more citations in the first 24 months than articles published in regular issues” based on “data sourced from Scopus and ScienceDirect comparing the performance (citations and downloads) of special content compared with that of regular articles” (2021). In a highly influential paper, Conlon et al. (2006) found that while Special Issues increased citations for less prominent journals, this was not the case for all journals in the sample; in the top management journals, there was no effect on citation rates. However, other studies in various fields have demonstrated that the mean per-year citation rate is about the same compared to articles outside Special Issues in the short and long run (Hendry, 2016; Olk & Griffith, 2004). More recent studies in health sciences using the Web of Science database indicate that Special Issues have a positive influence on immediate citations, overall citations compared to regular issues and a positive effect on impact factors following publication (Smith et al., 2012). Upon writing this editorial, we could not find studies explicitly focused on management education and whether these citation trends are parallel or vary from these studies in the field. In our experience, we suspect that Special Issues do indeed have a positive impact on article citations, but we strongly encourage research into this question!
We have also found that readers profit from the “one-stop shopping” of a Special Issue and the ability to understand the state of the field for a given topic. In these issues, readers can learn about major topics for debate, emerging areas of interest, and novel research ideas. This can be anyone at any career stage seeking to build knowledge in a domain (Mowday, 2006). That said, we have found that Special Issues can be particularly useful for those entering the field for the first time, such as graduate students. For instance, those wanting to learn all about specific topics in the context of management education can explore our previous Special Issues about teaching and learning in doctoral programs, sustainability, mental health and psychological well-being, and experiential learning in large classes, to name just a few.
Journals benefit in multiple ways, such as citations, as mentioned previously, future editor talent development, and raising the journal profile. For cultivating talent, Guest Editors essentially have a realistic job preview of the day in the life of an Editor-in-Charge (Rynes, 2003). This is indeed the case for JME as four of the last six Editors and Co-Editors had previously served as a Guest Editor for a Special Issue: Lund Dean with “The Challenge of Teaching Ethics”; Forray and Leigh with “Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME)”; and Edwards “Mental Health and Psychological Well-Being Among Management Students and Educators.” Another bonus for Guest Editors is that they develop an expertise and depth of knowledge within a domain from the orchestration of the entire peer-review process. For example, Guest Editors learn how to promote Special Issues, liaise with prospective authors, select reviewers, write decision letters, and are responsible for the final selection of articles. Finally, regarding the journal profile, some have argued that Special Issues benefit “specialized niche journals . . .because special issues attract the attention of both prospective authors and readers” (Priem, 2006, p. 388). Anecdotally, we think this is accurate and see this as another opportunity for empirical analysis.
What’s Concerning About Special Issues and What is JME Doing About it?
At the same time, concerns have been raised about Special Issues, and we feel that it is important to acknowledge some of these here. For example, some authors have argued that editors’ need for control and managing uncertainty about submission, also known as “white page fever,” fuels Special Issues (Mowday, 2006). Other scholars have raised questions about higher acceptance rates in Special Issues compared to regular submission (Hendry, 2016; Taylor & Francis, 2021). There are other more macro and philosophical considerations like Special Issues shifting the open marketplace of journals towards a “command economy” of ideas by prioritizing certain topics over others (Priem, 2006). Priem’s main argument is that too many Special Issues will suppress innovation by “squeez[ing] out quality articles on other topics that otherwise would have appeared in regular issues” (p. 385) that have subsequently been dedicated to Special Issues. While this zero-sum argument might be a concern in the most elite journals, this “limited real estate” argument is not one for JME. There have been 12 Special or Themed issues (70 articles) over the last six-year period. While there has been quite a range of the percentage of Special Issue pages compared to regular article submission pages by year, we have committed around 1,388 pages out of 5,085 total to Special Issues over the past six years, or about 27%.
One of the main rationales for Special Issues is to spur research on new, innovative topics and showcase ideas from specific communities of practice (Rynes, 2003). This “collocating papers focusing on a specific theme [permits] opportunit[ies] to review the existing theme, examine previously unfolded aspects, propose and develop new approaches, exchange perspectives, and encourage new lines of research”, which in some cases has led to new journals (Das, 2017, p. 159). At the same time, some have argued that topics can’t be completely trailblazing, as there is not yet an established community of researchers around these nascent topics (Mowday, 2006). We agree with this general idea that there needs to be a large enough community to solicit manuscripts and a significant pool of reviewers for an effective peer review process. Fortunately, JME supports novel and avant-garde research through the essays section and our soon-to-be-released interviews section. The entire editorial team encourages researchers with fresh, unusual, and unique approaches to management education that are emerging to consider submission to these sections and to speak with either us Co-Editors or an Associate Editor.
A final concern about Special Issues is who publishes papers in them. Since Special Issues rely on specialized networks of scholars, there is apprehension about insider-outsider dynamics where certain individuals have access to relationships and information about a call. Furthermore, there are empirical questions about who gets published. In some fields there is a worrying finding that more experienced and veteran scholars from national research institutions dominate accepted submissions (Das, 2017). Again, we are not familiar with recent studies in management education that investigate such trends and certainly encourage such studies within our field for us to understand if this is happening in our domain. From our internal analytics, we know about the prevalence of authors from North America and Europe in JME already, so we actively encourage our Special Issue teams to host workshops for aspiring authors, advertise the call on numerous international and national management scholar networks, and make themselves available via email and at conferences to prospective authors.
What’s in JME’s Special Issues?
Clearly, there’s a lot to learn about Special Issues in the field of management education and JME. We see two trends from our abbreviated review of the last several years. First, we average about two Special Issues per year. As shown in Table 1, JME has had 12 Special Issues (including shorter “themed sections” and “special sections”) in the last six years.
List of Special Issues 2016–2021.
Second, what makes our Special Issues distinctive is that many of them reflect our roots as a humanistic journal with a strong focus on responsible management education themes. All our editions, regular and Special Issues can be connected to SDG #4-Quality Education since this is the journal’s mission to be a leader in providing new and evolving knowledge about experiential education. Looking further back over the past 15 years, 10 of our Special Issues have covered numerous other SDGs such as #1 Reducing Poverty, #5 Gender Equality, #10 Reducing Inequalities, and numerous sustainability and climate SDGs. We are proud to say that our Special Issues showcase a variety of important experiential learning methods, debates, and content in management education.
Interested in Submitting a Proposal?
As mentioned earlier, we have recently instituted an open call for Special Issue proposals at JME, meaning that prospective Guest Editors can submit proposals at any time throughout the year. At JME, the purpose of a Special Issue is to “. . . push forward management education by highlighting emerging educational practices, interrogating and critiquing common conventions in teaching and learning, and/or integrating management education and other andragogy and pedagogy streams.” So, what should you do if you have an idea for a Special Issue? As previous Guest Editors of Special Issues, we understand the temptation to begin contacting prospective authors and generating ideas for manuscripts quickly! However, we have two pieces of advice for those considering a Special Issue proposal:
Contact Us First to Discuss Your Idea
We are always open to discussing ideas about proposals for Special Issues. Letting us know your idea before writing a full proposal has several benefits. For example, we can let authors know whether a Special Issue proposal is a good fit for JME and its audience and whether other authors have submitted a proposal for a similar topic. If we believe that your idea has merit, we will invite you to submit a detailed proposal for anonymous peer review.
Read the Call for Proposals
It is very important that potential Guest Editors read the Call for Special Issue Proposals on the JME website before submitting their proposal. As outlined in the document, we use multiple criteria to assess whether a proposal should be developed into a Special Issue. Specifically, along with our team of Associate Editors, we consider: how the proposal aligns with JME’s aims and scope; the relevance and innovative character of the proposed topic; the past work and track record of potential Guest Editors; the potential of the topic in question to influence the field, practice, and research agenda; the potential impact and visibility of the Special Issue; and the editors’ ability to attract strong submissions through networks, associations, and learned societies. We also note that association with a conference is beneficial as an avenue for promotion, but it is not mandatory.
At the moment, JME has two exciting calls for papers involving Special Issues focused on educational technology and careers respectively. The first one is “From Taylor to Tableau: Technology as a tool, topic, and differentiator in management education” and will be edited by Scott J. Allen, Steven A. Edelson, and Micheal Stratton. The closing date for submissions is January 15, 2023. The second is focused on Careers. Watch our masthead on the JME webpage for the final title and details.
In keeping with our tradition at JME, we provide considerable feedback to prospective Guest Editors. We are certainly willing to assist them in developing proposals that can be successful Special Issues. Please do reach out if you have an idea you would like to discuss with us.
In This Issue
We have an outstanding selection of articles in this issue that address a wide variety of topics and showcase most of the paper types published in JME. As usual, all articles have important practical implications for educators, and some of the ideas can (and should!) be implemented immediately. To begin, Silvia Pessoa, Thomas D. Mitchell, Maria Pia Gomez-Laich, Michael Maune, and Cecile Le Roux present an interdisciplinary collaboration in their instructional innovation piece titled, “Scaffolding the Case Analysis in an Organizational Behavior Course: Making Analytical Language Explicit.” The authors describe the process of collaboration between business faculty and English faculty at a branch campus of a U.S. university in the Middle East, a relatively under-studied context in management education. In the paper, the authors provide the details of the assignment and describe two sets of instructional materials used to support students in the course. As required in an instructional innovation, the authors also offer evidence of the effectiveness of the collaboration, including students’ final grades, student feedback surveys, and linguistic analysis of students’ writing. We believe that this paper will be especially useful to educators considering opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, as well as those who teach students for whom English is a second language.
In the second article, “Advancing Leadership Education and Development: Integrating Adult Learning Theory,” Scott J. Allen, David M. Rosch, and Ronald E. Riggio argue that leader development programs in business schools tend to focus on cognitive training and pay little attention to other important learning orientations. In response to this concern, the authors propose “a comprehensive model of business leader education and training that incorporates and integrates five primary orientations to adult learning (cognitivist, behaviorist, humanistic, social cognitive, constructivist).” Importantly, the authors emphasize that instructors must adopt an integrative approach and should offer multiple opportunities for student learning. They suggest that military education and medical school represent comparative models for how business schools could teach leader development more effectively and provide specific examples for illustration. Finally, they offer specific suggestions for how business schools can improve their leader development programs. We are certain that all educators with an interest in leadership and leader development will find this article very useful.
“What does it mean to teach and learn in a post-truth classroom?” Authors Stephanie A. Welcomer, Mark E. Haggerty, and Linda M. Sama address this question in the third paper, an engaging and provocative essay titled “Management Education in a “Post-Truth” World: Critical Theory’s Contribution to Addressing Disruptions to Learning and Communication.” In particular, they focus on why the phenomenon of post-truth poses a threat to learning in the management classroom and how educators can address it through various strategies. As post-truth is a pervasive phenomenon throughout society, we believe that all educators will find this essay valuable. Specifically, the authors highlight post-truth disruptors that educators must grapple with today, namely: (1) the status of information, (2) information search methods (including students’ increasing reliance on social media for research), and (3) uncivil discourse. Following this, they draw on the work of Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas to analyse the disruptions in more depth. They argue consequently that educators should focus on four practices to respond to post-truth disruptions: information search, information evaluation, civil dialog, and reflection.
The fourth article in this issue, “A Balanced Strategy for Entrepreneurship Education: Engaging Students by Using Multiple Course Modes in a Business Curriculum,” is the first of our two empirical papers. It is our hope that this innovative and impactful research will capture the attention of readers interested in entrepreneurship education and help shape their teaching practice. Here, author Christian Schultz investigated students’ experiences and outcomes in two different entrepreneurship courses: a business plan course and a lean startup camp. While the results revealed that “any entrepreneurship course participation contributes to the students’ entrepreneurial intentions, students gain very different learning outcomes depending on the courses’ types.” Specifically, although the business plan course had a positive impact on the entrepreneurial activity of students with low initial entrepreneurial intentions, this was not true for students with high initial entrepreneurial intentions. The results also indicated that the lean startup camp was best suited to students who were already interested in entrepreneurship with above-average entrepreneurial intentions. Schultz highlights several implications for practice and argues that the results “indicate the need for a nuanced assessment of different pedagogies in EE [Entrepreneurship Education].”
In the second empirical paper and fifth article, “Should It Stay or Should It Go? Developing an Enhanced SWOT Framework for Teaching Strategy Formulation”, Franz T. Lohrke, Matthew J. Mazzei, and Cynthia Frownfelter-Lohrke acknowledge long-held concerns about SWOT analysis as a pedagogical tool. We believe that these will resonate with many readers at JME who have experience using SWOT analysis in the classroom. After reviewing the origins of SWOT analysis, how it is usually presented in textbooks, and common criticisms, the authors propose “a refined and enhanced SWOT framework, anchored in extant strategy research and learning theory.” The authors also highlight the pedagogical advantages of their enhanced framework and offer evidence for its efficacy using examples of students’ work and preliminary data. Overall, the authors offer our readers an innovative and immediately useful framework that can be implemented when teaching strategic management, especially when using case-based analysis.
The final article in this issue, “Short-Term Study Abroad Research: A Systematic Review 2000-2019”, is the first comprehensive review into a topic rarely addressed in management education: short-term study abroad (STSA) programs. Here, Marina Iskhakova and Andrew Bradly begin with a brief review of the literature and describe STSA programs in detail. Following this, they outline their method and process of the systematic review, which focused on 156 studies on STSA published between 2000 and 2019. They offer readers a STSA conceptual review model to help guide future studies; we strongly encourage readers interested in this topic to review this comprehensive model in detail! Importantly, the authors emphasize that they observed “[a] lack of shared conventions, lack of common direction, and significantly weak theoretical underpinnings” in their review, and highlight these as important areas to address moving forward. They suggest several implications for practitioners and management educators specifically and propose key directions for STSA research in future.
Conclusion
We believe Special Issues will remain part of the academic publishing landscape for the indefinite future, even with the conceptual and empirical debates about the benefits, impact, and rationales. When discussing the topic of Special Issues for management education’s scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) with former JME editors, Dr. Diana Bilimoria offered these insights:
I believe Special Issues do play a particular domain-expanding role within the field of SOTL: they introduce emerging topics of interest that may not be as commonly experienced or thought about (e.g., the recent “dark side of experiential learning” SI in JME), they can shape the emergence of a new field or subfield of SOTL by giving legitimacy to a hot topic (e.g., online teaching and learning), and they can broaden authorship patterns by bringing new authors from different disciplines within the journal’s fold.
We encourage aspiring authors at all career stages from around the globe to reach out to Special Issue editors and submit their work for review. Similarly, we invite potential Special Issue teams to pitch topics that enlarge, extend, and stretch the management domain by spotlighting nascent educational practices and opportunities, engage with both the perennial challenges within the teaching and learning process, and tackle macro-environmental realities in which we are preparing our students manage and lead.
